Any experience with Broadcom ICOS out there?

Fri Jan 5 21:46:52 UTC 2018

Thank you everyone for the responses so far; I should probably re-phrase 
the question at this point ...

Has anyone had production experience with Broadcom ICOS and the features 
it claims to support? Positive or negative?

On 1/5/18 2:46 PM, joel jaeggli wrote:
> 
> 
> On 1/5/18 10:50 AM, Bryan Holloway wrote:
>> Fiberstore is rolling out some CRAZY cheap 100Gbps switches, and I'm 
>> curious if anyone in the community has any thoughts or real-life world 
>> experience with them.
>>
>> E.g.: https://www.fs.com/products/69340.html
>>
>> For the price point, it's almost in the "too good to be true" category.
> The COGS on a single ASIC tomahawk switch was is in $5000-7000 range. so 
> it's consistent with a low value add reseller of merchant silicon. that 
> silicon is getting older (tomahawk 3 was announced in anticipation of 
> 2018) so we can presume they are getting cheaper. I generally have a 
> favorable experience of FS but then I buy optics and cables, not 
> switches so your mileage may vary.
> 
>> Naturally it claims to support an impressive range of features 
>> including BGP, IS-IS, OSPF, MPLS, VRFs, blah blah blah.
> The software stack is Broadcom ICOS. if you're not familiar with that I 
> start looking at that. if it meets you needs that's cool. if not you 
> might be looking at cumulus or onos. That said Broadcom does enough to 
> get their customers (whitebox odms) out the door, not necessarily the 
> customers of those odms so your recourse to a developer is kind of 
> limited which you get a from a vendor more involved in the software 
> stack. A lot of those choices here depend on how responsible you want to 
> be for what's running inside the box.
>> There was an earlier discussion about packet buffer issues, but, 
>> assuming for a second that it's not an issue, 
> It can be avoided, but for people used to running all 10Gb/s cut-through 
> trident 2s kind of hot, some of consequences are kind of impressive. 4 
> much smaller buffers and the virtual assurance that you'll be doing rate 
> conversion eats into the forwarding budget.
>> can anyone say they've used these and/or the L2/L3 features that they 
>> purportedly support?
>>
>> Thanks!
>>             - bryan
>>
> 